About Hospital Compare
A plain-language view of public data about the quality of care at more than 4,000 Medicare-certified U.S. hospitals.
The information on this site comes from public data published by CMS, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Learn more in the CMS Provider Data Catalog. Hospital Compare is independent and is not affiliated with CMS.
What is Hospital Compare?
Hospital Compare has information about the quality of care at over 4,000 Medicare-certified hospitals, including Veterans Administration (VA) medical centers and military hospitals across the country. Use it to find hospitals and compare the quality of their care, and talk with your health care provider about which hospital will best meet your needs.
What is Medicare?
Medicare is the federal health insurance program for:
- People who are 65 or older
- Certain younger people with disabilities
- People with End-Stage Renal Disease (permanent kidney failure requiring dialysis or a transplant, sometimes called ESRD)
What information can I get about hospitals?
Overall hospital quality star rating
Summarizes many measures into a single 1–5 star rating, making it easier to compare hospitals side by side.
General information
Name, address, phone number, type of hospital, ownership and services such as emergency care.
Survey of patients’ experiences
How recently discharged patients answered a national survey about communication, responsiveness, cleanliness and quiet.
Timely and effective care
How often or how quickly hospitals give recommended treatments for common conditions, including emergency department waits.
Complications and deaths
How often patients had serious complications or died within 30 days of a hospital stay for a specific condition.
Unplanned hospital visits
Whether patients returned to a hospital after a stay or outpatient procedure.
Payment and value of care
How payments for patients treated at a hospital compare with hospitals nationally.
Methodology
Data releases. CMS refreshes its hospital datasets several times a year. We load one snapshot per release year; the footer of every page shows the date of the most recent snapshot. Each panel on a hospital profile labels the release, year or reporting period its numbers come from — some measures cover patients treated one to three years earlier.
Comparisons. Hospital profiles show the hospital alongside up to three nearby hospitals of the same type and, where CMS publishes them, state and national averages. “Higher” and “lower” than national labels describe direction only; they are not tests of statistical significance. Where CMS itself compares a hospital with the national rate, we show that comparison.
Missing data. When CMS does not report a measure for a hospital — often because too few patients qualified — we say so instead of showing a zero.
Star ratings are assigned by CMS, not by Hospital Compare or its users. Read the glossary for plain-language explanations of every measure.
Who built this
Hospital Compare is engineered and designed by Capital Technology Group (CTG). CTG provides mission-critical technology solutions for the federal government, including enterprise architecture, web application development, UI/UX design, information security and data analytics.
